Principal Investigator(s):
Craig T. Ramey, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill;
James J. Gallagher, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill;
Frances Campbell, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill;
Barbara H. Wasik, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill;
Joseph J. Sparling, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

Summary

The data come from two consecutive longitudinal studies on
the effectiveness of early childhood educational intervention for
children at high risk for developmental delays and school failure. The
projects are the Abecedarian Project and a related study, the Carolina
Approach to Responsive Education (CARE). Combined, the two studies
test the hypothesis that child care, home visit, and home school
resource interventions can enhance cognitive and academic outcomes for
children at risk for school failure due to factors such as poverty,
low maternal IQ, or low parental education. The study is a prospective
randomized trial with participants from low-income families either
participating in the planned "treatment" groups or serving as
untreated controls. All have been followed from birth to adolescence.
These studies provide the only experimental data regarding the
efficacy of child care interventions that began during early infancy
and lasted until the child entered kindergarten. In addition, the data
allow for tests of the efficacy of intervention during the primary
grades. The Abecedarian Project recruited children born between 1972
and 1977. At entry to school, half of the children within each of the
two randomized preschool groups were randomly assigned to receive a
home school resource teacher program during the first three years of
elementary school. Children recruited for Project CARE (Carolina
Approach to Responsive Education), however, were born between 1978 and
1980 and randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups: child
care plus home visits, home visits only, or control. All Project CARE
children assigned to either the child care plus home visit or home
visit only groups also received the home school resource teacher
treatment during the first three years of elementary school.
Essentially, three educational treatments were provided: educational
child care from six weeks to school entry, home visit from six weeks
to school entry, and home school resource services during the child's
first three years of school. They varied in terms of intensity and
orientation. The child care treatment was essentially child-centered
and offered the most intensive exposure to education. It involved the
child receiving child care at the child development center from
infancy until entry to kindergarten. The home visit and home school
treatments were less intensive and were family-oriented, emphasizing
the role of the parent as a change agent in the child's development.
Participants were tested based on four different measurement scales:
maternal measures, quality of the family environment, cognitive
assessment, and academic achievement. The maternal measures include
variables such as marital status, maternal and paternal age,
education, and family socioeconomic status. The cognitive assessments
include the Bayley Scales of Infant Development at 3, 6, 9, 12, and 18
months, the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale at 24, 36, and 48
months, the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities at 30, 42, and 54
months, the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence at 60
months, and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised
(WISC-R) at 6.5, 8, 12, and 15 years. Some of the tests were
administered in only one study for a particular age. These include the
Mental Development Index (MDI) at 3 and 9 months and WISC-R at 15
years (Abecedarian only). Some achievement tests such as Peabody
Individual Achievement Test (PIAT) were administered in the fall and
spring of the first two years of public school (kindergarten and first
grade if the child was at grade level both years) for the Abecedarian
Project. The Woodcock-Johnson was administered in the fall and spring
of the Abecedarian child's third year of school, in the summer
following their seventh and tenth years of school, in the fall and
spring of the Project Care child's first three years of school, and in
the summer following their seventh year of school.

Geographic Coverage

Smallest Geographic Unit

Data Collection Notes

The codebook is provided by ICPSR as a Portable
Document Format (PDF) file. The PDF file format was developed by Adobe
Systems Incorporated and can be accessed using PDF reader software,
such as the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Information on how to obtain a copy
of the Acrobat Reader is provided on the ICPSR Web site.

Universe

Children at risk for school failure due to factors such as
having a teenage mother, parents with less than a high school
education, and families with very low incomes who lived in or around a
small city in the Southeast United States.

Data Source

Interviews with parents, observations of the families,
individually administered cognitive and academic achievement tests,
and extraction from school records.

Data Type(s)

survey data

Response Rates

In the Abecedarian study, 109 of 122 participants
agreed to their random assignment and enrolled a child. In one family
with twins, one sibling was admitted, giving 111 children in the base
sample. In the CARE sample, 64 of 65 eligible families agreed to their
random assignments. The sample included two sets of twins giving a
base sample of 66 children born to 64 families. The combined original
base sample thus consisted of 177 children born to 173 families.
Subsequently, one Project CARE child died and was replaced with no
data added to the database. The archived data file thus contains 176
subjects, 111 from ABC and 65 from CARE. In Year 3 the response rate
was 85 percent. In Year 7, it was 92 percent and in Year 10 it was 94
percent.

Original Release Date

2004-12-08

Version Date

2004-12-08

Version History

2004-12-08 ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection:

Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes.

Notes

The public-use data files in this collection are available for access by the general public. Access does not require affiliation with an ICPSR member institution.